Get Out

Get Out - Being Black in a White World

 "I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could" - the impression this phrase makes on you can change depending on whether you're black or not. To a white person, this might sound like a progressive statement. To a black person, not so much. This is because there is racism hidden in this statement. That racism is what Get Out is about - the hidden racism in a liberal white-majority society, a society that prides itself on being diverse, yet only cares about the people that contribute to that diversity for a certain objective, a certain image, and not caring about their humanity. Jordan Peele shows us what it feels to be a person of a minor ethnicity in such a society, a liberal white world that may seem friendly on the outside but has a hostile heart at its core. A world meant to maintain the supremacy of a certain group of people but uses a mask of a society that gives power to all the people. Of course, to understand the racism in the sentence above mentioned, we need some context about what situation that sentence was said and the way it was said (the way things are said is very important in a secretly white supremacist society).

 To make a film about racism in a liberal society is harder than making a film about racism in a conservative society. We have seen that countless times and we all know about it. We all know about the horrors of slavery. We all know about the Holocaust. We all know about the Apartheid. We all know about Jim Crow and the public lynching in the American South. We all know about the KKK and Neo-Nazism. We all have seen films and documentaries about those things and we'll keep seeing them. But racism present in these things is easy to see because it's blatantly unhidden - it's not hidden at all! This is different in a liberal society, a society that shows stock photos of minorities smiling and having a good time together with white people while, in reality, they still live in impoverished and segregated neighborhoods; a  society that puts minorities in front of a big camera saying how much progress we have accomplished while, at the same time, it shoots protesters demanding equal rights away from the focus of big cameras. This superficially diverse and advanced society is not easy to criticize. Everything seems perfect. Maybe too perfect. This society is like a shiny, red, beautiful apple that seems savory and delicious but, when you bite into it, you notice the interior is completely rotten, maybe a few maggots are inside. This rot and these maggots are what Jordan Peele shows us in Get Out.

 At the beginning of the film, we see the red peel of this metaphorical apple. We see a perfect New York apartment. The main character, who is black, has a white girlfriend. A white person would think "That's progressive, that's nice", a black person would think "Beware, brother" (this is a paraphrasing of what Jordan Peele said in an interview). They are leaving for the weekend to go to her parents' house in the countryside. When they are packing, Chris - played brilliantly by Daniel Kaluuya - asks his girlfriend, Rose - played by Allison Williams - if she told her parents that he's black. She answers that she hasn't, it's not something that she felt should be mentioned. Immediately we start to feel the rot inside the apple as we just started biting into it - that's how superficial the beauty of the apple is. This attitude is a reference to the "color-blind" philosophy that many liberal white people tend to defend - a society that acts as if color of the skin doesn't exist. This ideal, although noble and seemingly good, when analyzed closely, its utopic message is fake and is only used to ignore inherent race issues in our current society. Ethnicities exist, and, in order to solve the issues connected to them, we can't hide behind pseudo-progressist ideals such as "race is a social construct" - I would like to clarify that I'm not saying that race isn't a social construct (or that it is), I'm just saying that that doesn't solve any societal problem and only maintains the status quo of current race relations - and that's the point Jordan Peele makes just in this simple scene.

 As such, I would also like to clarify that I'm white, and, as such, I might be writing about some of these issues with a certain "white prejudice" since I have an experience of our society from the point of view of a white person, and so I have benefited from the privileges of being a white person in a white-majority society. In this text I'm doing an exercise of seeing our society from the point of view of the unprivileged, basing my arguments on what I have read in articles and books and what I have seen in documentaries in the past few months - the past few months I have been doing sort of a research on these issues.

 And so, let's bite a little deeper into the apple, shall we?

 When Chris and Rose arrive at her parents' house we start to see some suspicious things. The thing that immediately jumps into our view is the servants. Rose's family - a white family - has two black servants - a gardener and a housemaid. They act strangely, speaking in an old-fashioned way. Rose's father refers to this, explaining that he had hired them when his parents got ill and, when they passed away, he didn't have the courage to let them go and so he kept them as servants. This is a metaphor to how, when the slaves were freed, they were kept under servitude to white Americans, remaining in a segregated environment and an almost identical situation to how they were before, with the single difference in the fact that they were no longer slaves, yet having the opportunity to do anything else taken away from them - the single freedom given to them being the freedom to be poor.

 All throughout Chris's stay in Rose's parents' house, there's a certain uneasiness. Certain strange events, a certain hostility, a certain falsity, almost as if Rose and her family are actors, acting like normal people and acting as "definitely not racist".

 On the first night, there's an important event. This event holds what perhaps is the most important message in Get Out. Rose's mother is a psychiatrist and knows hypnosis techniques. After returning from a strange encounter with the gardener outside the house while he went for a smoke, Chris runs into Rose's mother - terrifyingly portrayed by Catherine Keener. She convinces him to sit down. They start talking about his smoking addiction - she knows how to treat it. Slowly we start to understand that something is happening - she is doing a repetitive movement and sound with a teacup she's holding. Rose's mother asks Chris about his mother. Slowly she starts to get into his mind and his trauma. Chris becomes paralyzed - hypnotized. She has control over him. And then she says, "Sink into the floor". Chris enters a state of hypnosis, sinking into a mental state where he has no control over his body, only seeing through a small screen what is happening in front of him - "the Sunken Place".

 "The Sunken Place". What does "the Sunken Place" mean and represent? Jordan Peele said, in a tweet: "The Sunken Place means we're marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us". The "Sunken Place" is the marginalization of minorities. It's the whitewashing of minorities and their experiences in movies. It's the way minorities are portrayed by the media. It's the way how problems faced by minorities are treated in a "white-friendly" way, ignoring the true issues. It's the disproportional percentage of people of color that are incarcerated. This is what the "Sunken Place" represents.

 However, the induction into this state of mind has an objective in the film - a follow-up message.

 On the second day, there's a party, where Chris is apparently the only black guy - the representation of the lack of black people in show business, or any higher business - this is probably something that Jordan Peele has experienced countless times in Hollywood. People approach him excited as if he's some kind of exotic animal. They touch him and ask inappropriate questions - an everyday problem for minorities. Nonetheless, Chris finds a "brother" - a black man wearing old-fashioned clothing. He acts strangely, though, like the housemaid and the gardener.

 After a while, a Japanese man asks Chris about his opinion on the African-American experience. On that moment, the black man that Chris met passes by and Chris calls him and asks what his answer would be. The man says that, for the most part, the African-American experience to him has been very good. In disbelief of his answer, Chris takes a photo with his phone, but he forgets to disable the flash. When the flash goes off, the man stops and starts to act strangely. He starts to scream at Chris, yelling "Get Out!". People seize him and take him away. 

 Some time passes, and Rose's mother is able to pull him back to his "normal" self. A seizure - that's the explanation given by Rose's father, who is a doctor. Everything goes back to "normal". In order to understand the meaning of all this, I'll have to talk about things that happen later in the film.

 We find out later that this is not a normal party (hence why I have been using normal in quotes). This party is an auction for Chris's body. What do I mean by this? Rose's family developed a technique that enabled them to transfer a white person's brain into a black person's body, making the white person's mind eternal while the black person's one would be lost in a limbo, destined to be simply a passive agent in their own body. 

 This has two sides to it. On one side, it's the ultimate form of slavery: using a black person's body to enhance the achievements of the white society, throwing away the conscience of the black person. On the other, it's a metaphor to the disenfranchisement of minorities. This is the way how minorities are misrepresented in social media in order to appease a white ideal of what those minorities are - a whitewashed image of the reality of minorities. This is why the character of Andre (the black man in the party) is important. He represents the people that belong to minority groups who go on social media - for example, TV - to say how things are so wonderful now. When writing about this, I think about an interview with Morgan Freeman I watched some time ago where he said something like "If we want to solve racism it's pretty easy: just stop talking about it". This is the white society using minorities to say "See? Aren't we so good and progressive?". This is what the Sunken Place represents - the whitewashing of minorities, dooming them to see themselves being misrepresented on TV, movies and social media. However, sometimes, there's something that makes these people that are being used to maintain a status quo crack under the pressure. This is represented by Andre's reaction to Chris's flash. And then the explanation given by Rose's father represents the explanations given to the behavior of these people by the media - they were drunk, drugged or plain crazy. And, also, don't black male celebrities stereotypically adopt different styles and start dating white women? Andre starts using an old-fashioned style and is married to a white woman. Get Out is a brilliant allegory for these issues and I could go on and on analyzing every little detail of this brilliant masterpiece of Social Horror.

 And so, we have reached the rotten core of the apple. Now we know what's inside it.

 To end this with a bang, I just want to reference my favorite part in this film - the ending - which I like to call "The Revenge of the Black Man".

 Chris is captured and held captive in a room in the house's basement, while the family prepares to replace his brain with a white man's brain. In here, there's again a comment on the liberal concept of "color-blindness" - the man whose brain is going to be transferred into Chris tells him that he isn't doing this because of his skin color, he's doing it because of his eyes (the man is blind), he doesn't care about his skin color. There's a television set in front of Chris that turns on, inducing him to sleep with the image and sound of Rose's mother's teacup. He ingeniously puts cotton from the sofa where he is sitting in his ears, faking to fall asleep when the TV turns on. When Rose's brother comes to take off his shackles, he wakes up and knocks him out. In the next sequence, he kills Rose's entire family and escapes. This represents the moment when minorities revolt against their oppressors.  Jordan Peele tells minorities to act smart, put the (metaphorical) cotton in their ears so they aren't put to sleep by the white social media, and then, through a (violent) revolution, free themselves from the shackles of oppression. The Black Man takes his revenge on the White Man for all the years of oppression - the reason why the White Man wants to keep the status quo, only making superficial gestures just to say that he is giving the Black Man freedom. These "gestures" are hollow and fake and are only done to keep the Black Man under a state of passiveness and docility. But, minorities won't be docile forever. A revolution is coming (it's already happening, #blacklivesmatter) and only then will true equality be achieved - This is the final message of this masterful social horror masterpiece.

 In Get Out, Jordan Peele shows us how it feels to be black in a white world - a hostile, racist world that hides under a veil of progressivism and inclusivity. In order to achieve a truly progressive society, minorities cannot be docile. Minorities won't be docile - society isn't docile to them, so why should they? And so, Jordan Peele spurs the current progressive movements forward and gives them an empowering message in the form of art - get out of the "Sunken Place", a revolution must happen. In a society where black lives only matter for the picture, black lives must revolt and demand dignity and rights by any means necessary, including violent ones. Black lives matter in every way, just like white lives already matter.

 Black lives matter. Period.